Paula Vidal

Out of Season Shelters

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Exhibition from November 12th to December 01st, 2022

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At Vorfluter, Paula Vidal will present her project Out of Season Shelters (OSS), an art installation that investigates and questions the terms “beauty”, applied to priscine nature, and “ugliness”, to humanized nature, in order to critize values implicit in the concept of ecology.

 

OSS reinterprets the agrarian architecture of the greenhouses of Almería, Spain. Criticized by national/international media, this sea of plastic extends over 360 km2, area slightly larger than Munich and is the world‘s largest concentration intensive agriculture. The fruits and vegetables grow in closed spaces that make visible the true ugliness: the careless consumption of out of season products from northern European countries, especially Germany.

 

OSS, ironically, transforms the image of greenhouses into an idealized scenography. Seeing beautiful what seemed horrible allows us to ask ourselves: What is more important aesthetics or ecology? What is ugly? The greenhouses? The symbol of consumption without limits, this endless sea of plastic? The anti-ecological burden of plastic? Or are they serviced because of the humans, impact on the landscape and the anthropocene.

 

By removing the burden of ugliness from plastic architecture, the aim is not to affirm or defend it, but to disarm the critique of aesthetics so that the real questions that allow for social change can emerge.